Nile River Basin

The Nile River Basin is a classic illustration of the political tensions surrounding drinking water resources, and it has been the subject of much research into the historical development of power games and mutual interdependency between the states which border it. The political changes in this group of states (particularly Egypt and Sudan) tend to permanently reconfigure the stakes governing water distribution. This map uses a combination of several sources and shows the number of countries affected between the upper and lower basin (and therefore the size of the populations concerned), their level of dependence on the Nile (in the case of Egypt it represents 97% of the country’s water consumption, 77% for Sudan, 55% for Eritrea, and so on) and the relative importance of dams: more than 10, of very different capacities, are currently in existence, and there are many ongoing projects.